page_title: Citizen, speak Turkish!
section_title: Political background
hierarchical_section_title: Citizen, speak Turkish! / Political background
caption_attribution_description: English: Hamdullah Suphi Bey (Tanrıöver)
context_page_description: The Citizen, speak Turkish! campaign was a Turkish government-funded initiative created by law students which aimed to put pressure on non-Turkish speakers to speak Turkish in public in the 1930s. In some municipalities, fines were given to those speaking in any language other than Turkish. The campaign has been considered by some authors as a significant contribution to Turkey's sociopolitical process of Turkification.
context_section_description: During the Ottoman Empire in 1911, the Committee of Union and Progress decided to employ the Turkish language in all the schools of the Empire, with the aim to denationalize all the non-Turkish communities and instil patriotism among Turks. The reformation of the state schooling system and of language by the compulsory use of demotic Turkish aimed for the linguistic homogenization of society. The standardization of the Turkish language aimed to sever the link with the Ottoman language and past in order to create a new sense of Turkish nationhood.
  
  When the Turkish Republic was founded, nationalism and secularism were two of the founding principals. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the leader of the early years of the Republic, aimed to create a nation state (Turkish: ulus) from the Turkish remnants of the Ottoman Empire. Kemalist ideology defines the "Turkish People" as "those who protect and promote the moral, spiritual, cultural and humanistic values of the Turkish Nation." Kemalist criteria for national identity or simply being a Turk also refers to a shared language. In 1931 in a speech in Adana, Atatürk was quoted during a speech as saying: 
  One of the most obvious, precious qualities of a nation is language. A person who says he belongs to the Turkish nation should in the first place and under all circumstances speak Turkish. It is not possible to believe a person's claims that he belongs to the Turkish nation and to Turkish culture if he does not speak Turkish.
  — Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
  Many Turkish politicians and intellectuals believed that in order to attain full rights as a Turkish citizen, one must learn and speak Turkish. One such intellect, Hamdullah Suphi Tanrıöver, believed especially that minorities could not be accepted as citizens of Turkey if they did not speak Turkish or accepted Turkish culture. Consequently, non-Turkish languages taught in minority schools were becoming less common, whereas in May 1923, the Turkish Ministry of Education made the teaching of the Turkish language, history, and geography compulsory in all non-Muslim schools. These subjects had to be taught in Turkish by "pure Turks" appointed by the Ministry. The "pure Turk" teachers received a salary set by the Ministry which was substantially higher than regular teachers, resulting in a heavy financial burden for minority schools.
  In 1935, during a speech at the Republican Party's fourth congress, Prime Minister İsmet İnönü was quoted as saying, "We will not remain silent. All citizens who live with us must speak Turkish!"
  The campaign went beyond the measures of mere policy of speaking Turkish, to an outright prevention and prohibition of any other language.
caption: Hamdullah Suphi Tanrıöver believed that minorities could not be accepted as citizens of Turkey if they did not speak Turkish or accepted Turkish culture
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